I read and I read fiction for the most part. I want to make the case though that fiction is not necessarily non-educational and is rather uniquely educational or educates in a unique way.
One common excuse for fiction reading is to suggest you learn passive facts about the setting as you progress pleasantly through the story, but that's not a particularly strong argument in favor or reading fiction. Sure I could pick up a book about Austen-era England or I could read an Austen novel and get a slightly inferior product education wise with a nice romantic chaser.
That's not what I'm talking about. Specifically I think fiction is a way to learn though experience vicariously, and I think there are some things learned best and perhaps only that way.
For example I could read a terse description of objectivism or I could read a Rand novel and walk a moment in the shoes of her characters. I would argue that the chance of fundamentally understanding what her philosophy is about through channel one is very low, although it takes a lot less time.
Another example: I could say "Sentience is not mutually inclusive or exclusive of understanding" or alternatively read Speaker for the Dead. "Morality resides entirely with intent rather than result" or read Ender's Game. "What is self?" or read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
The deepest and perhaps most important topics can best be addressed this way. Regardless of how you feel about the historical accuracy of the Bible or Qur'an, certainly someone found it valuable to tell stories and parables to covey abstract concepts.
Here's the problem with learning through fiction: the only thing you can learn about through fiction is the mind of the author. When you read a Rand novel, you don't learn anything about how objectivism works, you only learn about Rand's imagination of how it works. Similarly, sentience may in fact be mutually inclusive or exclusive of understanding; just because you can describe a circumstance in which something is true doesn't mean it can ever be true.
This doesn't mean that fiction is useless for learning about the world. It just means that fiction does not contain the tools necessary to decide if something is true (or accurate, or possible). Fiction may spark an idea or make an argument, but you must go outside of fiction to see if those ideas have merit.
Granted most fiction wont provide an objective audit of views on any subject, but to say that the only thing you can learn is the mind of the author oversimplifies the cognitive process that takes place during reading, as well as the issues addressed by fiction.
Reading in any non-topical sense forces you to evaluate what you are reading and helps create those new connections in your brain. At the same time, many of the deep issues addressed in fiction are completely outside the realm of factual verification.
There are two main pieces to our perception of the world - the bare facts and the larger picture you get from combining the facts. The larger picture is more universal than the bare facts, so it is more useful than a use case.
Plus, and this is often ignored today, big pictures are not entirely mutually exclusive. To use a comp sci analogy let's look at search algorithms:
Use cases are more similar to deterministic partial solution searches (backtracking depth first search, breadth first search) for which the more interesting problems are intractable. Additionally, such search algorithms are very self contained, and it is usually quite difficult to combine them, making these algorithms a one time tool.
On the other hand, big pictures are more similar to stochastic solution spaces searches, which won't get you the best solution, but they'll get you a pretty good one much, much more quickly. And since solution space searches all interface with the same space, they can be mixed and matched depending on what is most useful for the problem domain. For example, with genetic algorithms, once you can make your problem domain fit a standard GA representation, the whole of GA theory can be applied.
But that's also the beauty of fiction in some contexts is that it allows one to explore ideas outside of their usual context and often within the realm of suspended disbelief.
Aldous Huxley, for instance, both in his fiction and non-fiction, and I see no great gap between them other than the mechanisms employed, has profoundly shaped my thought with his writing.
What about fiction that simply describes how people feel, act and behave? Not every story has to be a metaphorical attempt to explain some philosophical concept.
I personally tend to look down on people who read only non-fiction (though obviously not as much as people who don't read at all). It suggests a lack of imagination. And I think perhaps that's the self-improvement aspect of fiction - it exercises the imagination.
Right, because reading _Godel Escher Bach_, _Shock of the New_, and _Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ (my current reading list) obviously doesn't exercise the imagination.
I said "only." And just for the record, I've read all of Hofstader's books, not just the popular/mainstream one.
EDIT: Ok, not all, just the ones in English. ;-)
And a further
EDIT: all three of those books are about "Art" more or less. I can't see how someone who read those books can't read fiction. So I'm guessing you missed "only."
I think so, it teaches us to form complete views of the world in our head - which allows us to see the world as it is, and as it could be, much more comprehensively.
I think the nature of this site is that we are somewhat critical of the mainstream (digg, etc). I.e. we look down on them. I didn't mean my comment to be taken personally, it is just my opinion, and it may be flawed. But I don't think so.
One common excuse for fiction reading is to suggest you learn passive facts about the setting as you progress pleasantly through the story, but that's not a particularly strong argument in favor or reading fiction. Sure I could pick up a book about Austen-era England or I could read an Austen novel and get a slightly inferior product education wise with a nice romantic chaser.
That's not what I'm talking about. Specifically I think fiction is a way to learn though experience vicariously, and I think there are some things learned best and perhaps only that way.
For example I could read a terse description of objectivism or I could read a Rand novel and walk a moment in the shoes of her characters. I would argue that the chance of fundamentally understanding what her philosophy is about through channel one is very low, although it takes a lot less time.
Another example: I could say "Sentience is not mutually inclusive or exclusive of understanding" or alternatively read Speaker for the Dead. "Morality resides entirely with intent rather than result" or read Ender's Game. "What is self?" or read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
The deepest and perhaps most important topics can best be addressed this way. Regardless of how you feel about the historical accuracy of the Bible or Qur'an, certainly someone found it valuable to tell stories and parables to covey abstract concepts.